I'm sorry that I'm obsessed with proving people wrong

There are two main apologetics strategies. One is to provide a rational defense of the faith, the other is to apologize for how terrible Christians are, in hopes that people would want to become Christians, themselves, as a result. I exclusively use techniques from the second category.

I blame no one but myself for this: I was the most obnoxious creationist that I've ever met, and I'm very sorry if you've ever been bored by my droning on about llamas and giraffes, or if I've offended you with my ignorance of biology (I've not studied it since seventh grade).

I was very interested in dinosaurs when I was a small child, and, as all young earth creationists know, dinosaurs are a Trojan horse for evolutionist propaganda. However, at age four, I was given a copy of The Great Dinosaur Mystery and The Bible, which shows, among other things, that a plesiosaur was caught by Japanese fishermen in the 1970's. Thus inoculated against evolutionary falsehood, I studied creationism, hoping to be able to prove wrong those evolutionists.

So, I harassed my evolutionist neighbor a few doors down, and her dad, and my history of science class in my junior year of college and a friend's roommate who majored in environmental science. I told them all about how 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' is bunk—this has been well established for a long time, and it's a shame that these things are repeated in textbooks today, but that doesn't mean evolution's wrong. I speculated wildly about probabilities of abiogenesis. I was willfully ignorant of how radiometric dating actually works.

I don't mean to throw any creationist friends under the bus by what I'm writing here, I honestly don't mean to implicitly accuse them of anything. I own what I'm saying here for myself. I was a brat.

I think that some creationists get into the scuffles that they do out of genuine concern for others' souls. I might have had some element of that in me, but I really wanted to be right about something that the majority got wrong.

I was prideful and conceited to think that I just needed to read a couple of books, and I would be able to say something meaningful to mainstream science. I didn't stop there; I thought that I, personally, would be able to shake up mainstream science by calling it out for being deceptive—I thought I had that measure of honesty with myself, that I could be that persuasive. I thought that evolutionists just thought what they did out of delusion. I was wrong.

I still want to be right, to show up a lot of people that I disagree with; I just want to be right about different things now. I shouldn't have that attitude, that's wrong, and I'm sorry. Please forgive me.

Take the baby out of the tub first

Christian agnosticism isn't simply about being very ambivalent about whether God exists.

Superstition is rampant in American Christianity, and I don't just mean finding the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. When people speak too confidently about knowing God's will regarding a specific situation, this is idolatry. Superstitious Christians are generally too quick to try to discern God's will in car wrecks and coincidences; this, too, is idolatry.

Superstitious Christians are inclined to see mundane problems as having a supernatural source. Even if this were true, it would be prideful to say that we could have some understanding of this.

I remember clearly asking a priest for advice about my problems with anxiety. 'It sounds spiritual.' he said. That's what I'd thought, too.

I thought that if I would learn to root my identity in God's love for me, if I meditated on God's grace that frees me from guilt, if Jesus could heal me, I would be free. Spirituality did help me, a lot, but not completely. As near as I can tell, my problems with anxiety have a strong physiological component. I don't blame anyone else for this, I don't blame myself, but I do think that my religious beliefs kept me from getting medical help with anxiety because looking for supernatural answers obscured the problem.

I have friends who deal with difficult problems, worse than anything I've faced myself. They get pat answers to their problems from Christians. My friends are told that Jesus wouldn't employ their coping mechanisms. They are told not to worry, and then my friends have to worry about worrying and dread what Jesus thinks of their feelings. When things don't go right for my friends, Job's comforters assume my friends' lack of trust in God is the problem. (Meanwhile, these same hypocrites blame their own problems on Satan.) Abuse victims shouldn't be told that they just need to think about how much God loves them.

Of course, I don't think these pat answers and misidentification of real-world problems are rooted in an orthodox understanding of Christianity. I've seen them less in traditional churches, and I've heard less nonsense by believers with good theological training.

The Christian agnostic method of acknowledging the good in Christian teaching, while being slow to say that one thing or another says much about God, separates Christianity from superstition.

Denny's and Cazbar and belief in God

When people go to Denny's, they pick out what they want to eat rather quickly, pancakes or Moons over my Hammy or a Grand Slam or what have you. Denny's is cheap and rather uniformly unpleasant.

I think that the nicest restaurant I've ever been to is Cazbar, on Charles Street, in Baltimore. It's a fancy Turkish restaurant. Before I went, I Googled for the proper etiquette for valet parking. I spent a little more time considering the menu there; the food was expensive, so I wanted to make sure I picked out the best things on the menu, the items I was most in the mood for. I'm glad I did. I recommend the mixed meze plate and the vegetable casserole.

I might pick up a board game on an impulse, but when I'm buying a new computer, I might take days to decide on the best machine I can afford.

Most of the time, people think about decisions and beliefs in terms of stacking up pros and cons and seeing which pile is higher; at least, that's what they think they're doing. Deciding takes effort, though, and they put more effort into deciding about things that are going to impact them more.

I don't know what to say when asked if I believe in God. Do I believe in God enough for what? I believe in God enough to hope that he's there. I believe in God enough to pray and smile at strangers and not use the F-word too much. I don't think that means much, because I think I'd do those things anyway, if God wasn't real. Do I believe in God enough to sing songs I don't really like that much? Yes. Do I believe in God enough to die for someone? I hope so. Do I believe in God enough to be a missionary in the jungle? No.

Invisible and ineffible

God doesn't seem real to me. I have had experiences with gas stations and monkeys and feelings and velcro and rice. I don't know that I've had an experience that could only have been an experience with God.

When I tell believers that I don't believe that God exists because I don't see sufficient evidence, they often talk about how God must be known by faith. I don't know what this means.

I think they mean that faith is halfway between belief and knowledge, where belief is what one thinks, and knowledge is justified true belief. I think they mean that we have some information to nudge us toward belief that God is there, but not enough to know for sure.

They've confused invisible with ineffable. God can be known certainly, the Bible says, but he must be known by faith. It's not like God is a little kid playing hide-and-seek, and we're supposed to look for him, and we can't see him, but we can see his shoes peeking out underneath the curtains. Instead, the problem of faith is that God could be completely obvious yet still impossible to relate to on our terms.

Orthodox theologians, in the tradition of St Gregory Palamas, talk about God's essence and his energies. God's essence is what we can not know, it is internal to God, it is how the members of the Trinity are united. The energies are how God interacts with the cosmos, and how we could, conceptually, know God for sure. God is ineffable in his essence, but knowable in his energies.

To say that we can't know for sure that God exists makes God either a wimp or a bully.

If God is real and good and loves us, he ought to let us know that so we could all exhale. Does God not want us to know that he's real? God can't be unknowable and good. I suppose that God could be real and knowable and that some people still wouldn't believe in him because they don't want to. However, I get angry when a believer meets a non-believer and, from the fact of their non-belief alone, assume they are either uninformed or dishonest. This understanding of God can't allow for honest doubters.

Some people say that God is real and good and loves us and he's not a bully, he's actually quite nice, so nice, in fact, that he keeps himself hidden from us so that we can be free to believe in him or not. This is on a par with believing that God can make a rock so heavy he can't lift it, or, in the formula preferred by Mr Andrews, this is as if God could make a burrito so hot it could burn the roof of his incorruptible mouth. This God could only be nice if knowing him were irrelevant.

One of the problems that I have in knowing if God is real is that I know how much I want God to be real. I want to know that I can live forever in heaven and that God will bring perfect peace to the world and that God loves me and gives me a name. I want to be free from worrying about my reputation and my success and my possessions and my self. The claims of hope that Christianity makes are so good it seems more likely to me that I would believe them because I want them to be true than because they're real. I compulsively second-guess myself. Maybe Lexapro will help with that, but I don't think it will. I think that if God's real, God, and only God, could make me rest in belief in him.

Prayer, the anthropic principle, fun, sin, vegetarianism, and Christian agnosticism

When I tell believing Christians that I don't believe that God exists, but that I still practice Christianity, they often tilt their heads or cross their eyes. I explain that, for example, I still pray. 'Who do you pray to?' is a question I get a lot. I suppose my prayers go the same place as my believing friends' prayers. If God's not real (and I think he's not), they go nowhere, and if he is (and I hope he is) then I'm sure he can hear mine and theirs without straining; God is the one who makes prayer work. If prayer depended on the strength of one's belief, no one's prayers would do any good. I admit that I don't pray as much as I used to and that it is a little painful now that I don't believe that God exists. Even so, prayer doesn't feel terribly different to me now than it did when I was a believer.

I know that it sounds like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth. I'm confused. The thing that holds faith and doubt together for me is the sheer fun of Christianity.

Jesus mocks Pharisees and hangs out with little kids. The most beautiful songs of worship are bound together with horrible, vile, racist, infanticidal anger. Jonah runs from God and God keeps catching him, with a storm and a monster and heat and a bug.

I'm a scientist, I spend my workdays laboring slowly and methodically, a small mistake I made once set me back a year. I like how Christianity doesn't bother to make much sense. Even so, it doesn't make sense in a sad and beautiful and good way, in the sort of way that people listen to jazz for fun and not experimental music.

I practice Christianity because I want to. I think that's why most people who call themselves Christians do so; in one way or another, it makes them happier. This is why it confuses me when Christians do evangelism by trying to make a hard sell, running up to someone on the boardwalk and accusing them of unspeakable acts or leaving cartoon booklets as tips in a restaurant or nagging or yelling or pulling a bait-and-switch or going door to door like cultists or putting irritatingly cute bumper stickers on their cars.

Some people like to argue that God exists by the anthropic principle, that if certain fundamental properties of the universe were ever so slightly different, then life as we know it wouldn't exist. Finding God in finely tuned numbers says nothing about whether God is interested in us, and if he isn't, I suppose the feeling would be mutual on my part.

I'm a scientist, I've spent a third of my life in college, I make charts for fun, I play with supercomputers on Friday nights, and I can't work out the numbers to see if it's even the case that fine-tuning is so special. Should only people smarter than me be able to know for sure that God is there?

However, the real reason why I think the anthropic principle is bogus is that it's boring. If the most persuasive way to know that God exists is by doing physics calculations, then I'm going to tell Grandma that I love her by sending her a copy of my simulations code; I'm sure she'll be impressed.

I used to be an obnoxious evangelist, and then I was a nerdy evangelist. I quit both when I couldn't annoy or convince myself into belief. Even when I was a believing Christian, guilt and certainty weren't enough for me to follow Jesus.

Christianity is a word for how I want things to be, and I don't simply mean 'love' or 'peace'; I'm not using Christianity as an old-sounding word for modern intellectual hipster virtues. When I talk about Christianity, I mean the historically grounded theologically orthodox Christianity.

I want a new world with no thorns and disease, where the ground is no longer toil to till. I want a city with a stream that runs through it, the Tree of Life growing on the bank of the stream. I want the lion to lie down with the lamb. I want people from all ethnicities living in peace and singing songs to God in their own languages.

Although I'd prefer hell to be empty, I want a place for free people to run from God. I want to sing songs that I don't like with some people I don't like every week. I prefer organized religion to disorganized religion, because, even if Christianity was made up by nomads suffering from heat stroke and mirages, they came up with something better than I would on my own. My religion would involve a lot of puns and math and Danish philosophy and it would probably kill me. I like the parts of Christianity that I don't like, because all the parts I didn't like I found out weren't really Christian or weren't really bad, difficult, perhaps, but not bad.

I like judgmental religious people, but I'd rather they figure out who to blame for 35,000 kids dying every day from hunger and preventable disease, and who to blame when my little brother gets made fun of. I even want them to blame me when I'm doing something wrong, and maybe I'll do the right thing instead. I like to talk about sin and despair and hubris because I know they're real for me, and not talking about them won't make them go away.

I don't want a Christianity in which I can just say a prayer or show up on Sunday morning or not cuss and be okay; I don't want a watered-down Christianity. I want Christianity to be as hard as it is, with Jesus calling me to death and sacrifice because I know that the things that are killing me aren't worth living for. I want Jesus to make it as easy as he can, though, because I can't fix me myself.

Enthusiasm about Christianity isn't the same as knowing that God is real, it doesn't do nearly as much to help me sleep better at night, but I don't know what I'd rather be enthusiastic about. Television is boring.

I used to tell people that I'm a vegetarian because I'm opposed to American over-consumption and mistreatment of animals in factory farms, but now I think I'll just say that I like to eat plants.

Leather wrist cuffs, vegans, and Christian agnostics

I was recently at an art fair; there was a booth dedicated to leather wrist cuffs. That seems like a curiously specific type of accessory. I wonder if leather wrist bands are associated with a lifestyle.


I wish I had a lifestyle. I'm a geek, that's sort of a lifestyle, but it's not like someone schooled me in the art of geek. I wish I were cool enough to be a punk. I don't know where I'd go to get punk clothes, though. I'd like a tattoo, but I have commitment problems. I'd need to get new music.

I'm pretty sure these things are necessary to become a punk, but I don't think that they're sufficient. Is there some organization that I should contact that will tell me what I need to do to be a punk? I am going to drive around the art school on Friday night and see if I can find a group of punks hanging out on a street corner. Maybe they'll tell me what to do.

One time I was at a party. My friend Liz told our host's mom that she's a vegan. 'Vegan? What's that?' Liz explained that, like vegetarians, vegans eat no meat, but also no animal byproducts. For the next few minutes, the mom asked Liz about specifics, 'So, can you eat cheese?' 'No, that comes from milk, which is from cows.' 'What about nuts?' 'Yes, because those come from plants.' 'Eggs?' 'No.' 'Beans?' 'Yes.' And so on.

A little earlier that summer I had become a vegetarian and ever since then I've become ensnared in discussions similar to the one between Liz and the mom.

Not eating animals isn't complicated, but it's counter-cultural. The conversation between Liz and the mom wasn't so much to inform the mom about the technical details of veganism, it was how Liz expressed to the mom that veganism might be alien but it's not inaccessible.

When I first realized that I am agnostic, I was afraid that I'd have to change everything, I'd have to quit church altogether or become a Unitarian Universalist, or that I'd stop praying, and I kind of like praying. I have a big set of thick Bible reference books, and I'd have to find some unsuspecting Christian to foist them off on. I've been agnostic for two years and I still haven't started swearing profusely or having orgies or doing drugs. Sometimes I feel guilty about this, that I'm inauthentic, that I'm hampered by the cultural mores imprinted on me when I was growing up as a homeschooled conservative Christian. Then I remember that there's no one to tell me I can't act like a Christian if that's what makes me happy.

Armoatherapy or death; or The Emerging Church Movement makes me a Christian agnostic

Seven out of ten kids who are churchgoing at age 18 aren't by age 30.

I could mention oodles of ways in which the church is 'irrelevant' to today's culture, but other people are better at complaining about that than I am.

The cliché response from the church to culture losing interest is to become more fundamentalist. Some churches see that the kids have quit going to church and started square dancing on Saturday night, so they start teaching that square dancing is sinful, it must be, because why else would kids stop going to church?



I've seen a more nuanced response in movements like the contemporary church, emergent church, and seeker-sensitive movements. These movements make it harder for me to believe that God exists.

I suppose these movements have diverse roots, but it seems that the theory behind all of them is that people aren't interested in Christianity because they're not aware of how it relates to their lives.

The phrase 'felt needs' pops up a lot. Back in the sixties, it was more common in evangelism to start the sales job with explaining to marks that they are sinners and are thus damned, and finish with a message about how Jesus will save them from hell if they become Christians.

These newer movements drop the first part of the sales job, because most sinners evidently don't feel like sin is their top problem. The modern strategy is to figure out if someone's looking for community, or healing, or entertainment, or financial stability, and then show them how Jesus can give them that.



If we can make Christianity look more like Pacific Northwest hipster spirituality with yoga mats and candles and incense and craft beer, so much the better.

This doesn't work as well as you'd think.

If you have a non-Christian friend you're trying to convert, and he drinks fair-trade coffee and is militant about recycling, the new strategy is to tell this friend about how Jesus is a militant environmentalist and social justice guru, which is true, but telling people about what Jesus likes isn't the same as encountering Jesus.

There's not a lot of magic to meeting felt needs. Christianity has to give a better sort of peace than can be had from meditation or aromatherapy. Christianity can't just meet a human need for community; people make clubs about tea and model railroads and knitting, we socialize based on who we're related to and where we live. Christianity must lead to an altogether different kind of community. Christians should use knowledge from psychology to heal people's souls, but Christianity has to provide a healing that psychology can't explain.

Relative to Jesus, things like aromatherapy, the Rotary Club, and talking cures are smaller and safer and more believable. Jesus is impossibly hard to believe in and he requires extreme things of us. If you're looking for fulfillment or esteem or peace, Christianity is probably not the shortest path to those things; at least, Jesus didn't seem to think so.

When a non-Christian finds their felt needs met in the church rather than in Jesus, this is a tragedy. If the church makes it too easy for outsiders by fulfilling their felt needs, they might stop short of a dangerous and real relationship with God.



Grandma doesn't have a good marketing department, she doesn't wear cool clothes, she doesn't listen to indie music, she doesn't have a trendy haircut, she's afraid of computers. She used her microwave as a breadbox. I wouldn't have it any other way, because Grandma and I love each other. Movements in Christianity that respond to culture's indifference to the church by trying to make Christianity more relevant scare me, because the church's job isn't relevance, its job is to be God's house, and God is content with living in a tent. The church's job isn't to make God exist, that's God's job. If God is real, our response to culture's loss of interest in the church ought to be faithful reliance on God to demonstrate himself on his own terms. It isn't.

Belief in God is impossible in two ways

When I was a believing Christian, I wondered why it was that it wasn't obvious to nonbelievers that God is real. I figured that it must be that they were biased and dishonest. For some reason, they didn't want to believe in God. I thought of Romans 1, where Paul talks about how the people who don't follow God deny that God is obvious because they 'became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened'.

From Boğaziçi, Asia, New Year

When I stopped believing in God, many of my believing friends thought that there were only bad reasons for not believing in God, that people who don't believe in God don't believe because they are dishonest and biased. These friends had different theories as to why I doubted. Some thought that I was confused and going through a phase and figuring things out, but, at this point, my doubt doesn't look like a mere phase. Some thought I just didn't have enough information, but I've read stacks of books. Some thought it was in response to some suffering that I'd experienced that I was blaming God for, but I can imagine a good God that allows hangnails and horrible professors to exist (I have a big imagination).

This is doubly painful. I feel pain because I want God to be real but he doesn't seem real. Hurt is piled on top of that when my believing friends think that I don't believe in God because, at my core, I don't want to.

One reason why people don't believe in God is because people are small, in a petty sort of way. Another reason is that God is big, in a perplexing sort of way.

Five words into the Bible, 'In the beginning, God created', good theologians give up theology as a job and become truck drivers or moms or professors. If God is perfect, why did he create something imperfect? If God is perfect, why would he create anything at all? Christianity teaches that creation is under God and in God, but it is not God, and that's a flat logical contradiction. It's not a seeming paradox, such that if we attain some sort of heavenly enlightenment, the doctrine of creation will make logical sense; we might believe it more easily with more enlightenment, but it won't ever make sense.

For things that are very impossible, very strong evidence of very impossible things is required. I need more than second-hand stories about someone thinking that God told them something or cancer going into remission or a bag of groceries being left on a doorstep in a time of need. These things might be unlikely, but God existing is less likely, if we're talking about the sort of God that's worth believing in at all.

Ten

I hear more about the Ten Commandments than the Ten Plagues. Why?

Mike Mike Mike and Bible numerology

When I was in high school, my two best friends at school were both named Mike. Both were upwards of six feet tall and somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 pounds. I was five foot five and three-quarters and skinny enough to crawl through air conditioner vents. We were all conservative Christians. We'd eat lunch together at the loser table in the cafeteria.

One Mike and I were in most of the same classes. We fought for the top grades, and he generally beat me. We sat next to each other on the bus. We had been in the same gym class in middle school, and had been partners in badminton.

We were in Mr Little's Earth Science class together. The first unit was on geology, and Mr Little talked a lot about how the earth was billions of years old and how we could know that.

Of course, Mike and I knew better than to trust things like radiometric dating; we were both young earth creationists.

I had been homeschooled from second through seventh grade. My seventh-grade science curriculum was supposed to be on 'Matter and Motion', that is, physics and chemistry. Every science book in that curriculum had a unit on birds and a unit on creationism. The key quotes that I remember are, 'Evolutionists date the fossils by the rocks, and they date the rocks by the fossils. This is circular reasoning.' and 'There was no entropy before the fall.'*.

So, on the bus ride home, on the first day that Mr Little lectured on the age of the earth, Mike and I talked about how we knew that that's just not true. I told him about how the earth's rotational speed was decreasing; if we were to back-extrapolate the earth's rotational speed to five billion years ago, the earth would have been flat as a pancake because of the centrifugal force.

In government class, Mike sat on my right and Jason sat on my left. On Halloween, Jason wore yellow pants that lit up like Christmas lights. Dan set in front of me. We made fun of Dan a lot, but I forget what we said that was amusing. Riley sat behind me.

Halfway through schoolyear, it came out somehow that Mike was a Jehovah's Witness. So were Jason, Dan, and that girl in English class. Mike said, 'We've got you surrounded!', jokingly. Riley was not a Jehovah's witness.

When I got home and told Mom and Dad, they showed me how to use the book, The Kingdom of the Cults, and they rented some videos from the Christian bookstore about the Jehovah's Witnesses, so that I would know how to defend my faith. I charted out on a napkin my main arguments, like how God's real name is Yahweh.

Later that week, the other Mike told me he was moving to North Carolina. I had lost both Mikes.

I was scared that I would succumb to Mike's propaganda and accidentally become a Jehovah's Witness; even though I am a good Calvinist, I was afraid that I would lose my salvation. I don't think I was particularly concerned about Mike's eternal soul.

Mike and I spent the rest of the school year trying to convert each other. We each put in a lot of time digging up the perfect Bible verse that would prove the other guy wrong. Mike gave me sticky notes with Bible verses to look up. A lot of his arguments required that I use his Bible, which translated John 1:1 as 'In [the] beginning the Word was, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.'

Our attempts at mutual evangelism were friendly and I eventually lost my fear of accidental conversion.

One of Mike's strangest arguments involved a verse from Revelation about a pregnant woman going into the desert for 'time, times, and half a time' (Revelation 12:14). Mike read this as 3.5 times; with one time being one thousand years (II Peter 3:8), for a total of 3500 years from the prophecy (585 BC) until the last judgment. Given that Jesus will reign for a millennium before the last judgment, Jesus was predicted to return in 1914. He did so invisibly, Mike said.

Also, it turned out that the other Mike wasn't actually planning on moving to North Carolina; he was just pranking us.

***

I was going to the hip contemporary church at this point; our youth leader was named Mike. He talked about grace a lot; he said that it is the thing that makes Christianity different from any other religion in the world. Mike talked a lot about his problems with road rage, and he was quick to confess how this was a consistent problem with him. He was free to talk about his shortcomings, though, because he believed in grace; he believed that repenting was more important than his reputation. He also taught us about the social gospel.

Mike told us about how he used to have a Jesus fish on his car, but he scraped it off because he didn't want Christians to look bad whenever he would cut somebody off.

There was a Christian video that Mike showed us a couple of times. It was made in the late seventies. It started with a college student waking up from a recurring dream in which he saw an old man wearing bib overalls, cutting down wheat with a scythe. This student was taking some college class in which he was told that religion isn't intellectually valid.

He started to doubt his faith, but, then, he came across an article that predicted Jesus' return to be imminent. The reasoning in the article was that, since a thousand years is as a day to the Lord, and Jesus was in the ground two days and rose on the third, and Jesus lived two thousand years ago, Jesus return must be soon, to usher in his millennial reign, the 'third day'. Also, the earth is six thousand years old, and it was made in six days, and the sabbath is the seventh day, so the earth is ready for a thousand-year sabbath, the millennial reign of Jesus.

The student got all set to make a big speech on campus based on the content of the paper. He then chickened out, and went to talk to the wife of the author of the article; on this visit, he saw a picture of her late husband, who was the man in bib overalls in his dream.

The student returned to campus. The student told the gathered crowd of skeptics that maybe the article isn't entirely sound, but we have lots of other reasons to think that Jesus is coming back soon; for example, Israel was re-formed as a state a mere thirty years ago. Even if Jesus isn't coming back soon, you never know when you will die, so you should go ahead and convert to Christianity, just in case.

After the movie ended, we talked about it, and Mike agreed that the Bible numerology was kind of hokum and that the story was kind of manipulative, but, he said, 'It makes a good point.'.

I was angry.

***

*If there was no entropy before the fall, then Adam and Eve must have been perfect crystalline solids.